A senior official calls the coming election “game over.” A senator calls it the gravest threat since the Civil War. Strip the labels and the two fears are identical — and two centuries old. This essay asks what actually changed. The answer isn’t the politics. It’s the speed.

Did the Founders intend to let a President grow rich in office — to take a foreign king’s gifts, or draw a second income from the government he led? They answered that in 1787. The answer was no. On a hot Thursday that August, a South Carolina delegate rose and added a sentence to the Constitution. No speech. No debate. The convention adopted it — unanimously, without one voice against — and moved on. That sentence became the Foreign Emoluments Clause. It has caused more argument in the last decade than it caused in the summer it was born. What I found, tracing it back to a snuffbox full of a French king’s diamonds, is a lesson our own age has half-forgotten: the Framers didn’t build a government that required good character to survive. They built one designed to withstand ordinary vice. My new piece on the sentence they wrote to keep a President from cashing in — and why it passed without a word. Link in comments.